A thief has sheepishly returned two artifacts stolen from an Israeli museum, some two decades after the fact. The sticky-fingered visitor restored the objects to the Museum of Islamic and Near Eastern Cultures in Be’er Sheva, Israel’s Antiquities Authority has announced.

A museum employee found a bag in the museum’s courtyard that contained two sling stones along with an anonymous and contrite typed note: “These are two Roman ballista balls from Gamla, from a residential quarter at the foot of the summit. I stole them in July 1995 and since then they have brought me nothing but trouble.”

Apparently addressing others who might be similarly tempted, he (or she) adds, “Please, do not steal antiquities!”

“Almost 2,000 such stones were found during the archeological excavations in the Gamla Nature Reserve, and this is the site where there is the largest number of ballista stones from the Early Roman period,” Dr. Danny Syon of the Antiquities Authority told ABC. “The Romans shot these stones at the defenders of the city in order to keep them away from the wall, and in that way they could approach the wall and break it with a battering ram. The stones were manually chiseled on site by soldiers or prisoners.”

Thieves changing their minds and returning stolen items to their rightful owners or places is a much more common occurrence than you might guess. Last December, a rare bronze sculpture by Medardo Rosso, stolen from Rome’s Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, was found a few days later inside a storage locker for public use near the entrance.

It seems that art thieves can sometimes get cold feet, even some 20 years later.

Medardo Rosso, Bambino Malato (Sickly Child) (1893-95)
Photo: Galleria d’Arte Moderna via ArtBlat